Security improvements planned at Hill County jail

Additional staffing, new equipment and more training for detention officers are among the things the Hill County Sheriff's Office plans to implement at the County Detention Center to better handle any potential disturbances, Sheriff Greg Szudera said today.

The jail will add one detention officer to each shift, Szudera said. The officer will be stationed in the control room of the jail to provide additional supervision to the "floor" detention officer who walks throughout the facility checking on inmates, he said.

To ensure that prisoners are familiar with the jail's rules, the Sheriff's Office is also installing a system that allows detention officers to show videos outlining proper behavior by prisoners, Szudera said. The video system will be integrated into the TVs in the jail's common area, and can be activated by the control room, he added.

The detention center will also create an eight-person response team based on a team used in Missoula County, he said.

The changes are at least partly in response to a June 3 incident at the Hill County Detention Center in which a number of inmates locked jailers out of two pods and refused to return to their cells, Szudera said. The prisoners returned to their cells after Havre police officers and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents responded to the jail.

The prisoners - apparently upset that they had not received commissary items - used playing cards and combs to jam electronic doors, preventing detention staffers from entering two pods, according to the documents charging six inmates with rioting. The prisoners overturned trash cans and wrote graffiti on walls before agreeing to return to their cells, the documents said.

The prisoners were able to jam the electronic doors when the floor detention officer left the pod to get toilet paper for an inmate, Szudera said. An extra detention officer stationed in the control room should help prevent similar incidents, he said, though he acknowledged that most of the options available to detention staff are reactive.

"There's nothing proactive you can do. How are you going to stop a person playing cards from walking over and stuffing the cards in the door?" he said. "The solution to that is more staffing to stand over their shoulder and watch them 24 hours a day, which is unreasonable," he said.

"People are always going to try to do something, and look for a way to cause some kind of problem in the facility. They don't want to be here in the first place."

When prisoners violate detention center rules, they are punished by losing privileges, Szudera said. That may mean being placed in lockdown, not receiving commissary privileges, losing visitation privileges, or having items confiscated by detention staff, he added.

"We took care of the door situation ourselves. When they use that stuff to jam them, we take that stuff away from them. We take what they use to disrupt the safe and efficient operation of the Hill County Detention Center, and if those items are a privilege, we remove that privilege."

One inmate recently spent four days in lockdown after he locked a detention officer in a cell, jail administrator Ric Munfrada said Tuesday.

The detention officer had been going from cell to cell, looking for a food tray that had not been returned by an inmate, when the prisoner closed and locked the cell door, Munfrada said.

To ensure that incidents like the June 3 disturbance are dealt with quickly and safely, the jail will create a special eight-person team, Szudera said. The eight will be selected from 12 detention center staffers who received training from the Missoula County Detention Facility's Disturbance Response Team, he added.

Last week Missoula's DRT was in Havre to train Hill County detention officers in cell extraction techniques and to demonstrate the use of nonlethal weapons.

"The DRT did an outstanding job for us, and getting some of our people trained in that line of work. Consequently, we are changing some of our daily routines based on the training we received," Szudera said.

The Sheriff's Office plans to purchase some nonlethal weapons systems to use in the detention center, Szudera added.

"We're going to implement our own disturbance response team, so that if we do have incidents like we had in June, the response team will handle that," Szudera said.

The cost of additional training and the purchase of nonlethal weapons systems will likely cost between $5,000 to $10,000, he said.

"I'm going to have to tighten belts and cut some areas to make this happen. I'm not asking for any more money. I'm working with what I have to work with," he said.

Szudera said strong reinforcement of detention center rules will help ensure that prisoners behave. All prisoners are given a copy of the jail's rules regarding prisoner conduct, and the new video system will help those prisoners who are illiterate, he added.

"Any time of day when the TVs are on, a detention officer can put in a video with the rules on it, so that if there is a person with a problem reading and writing, they can have the rules read to them," Szudera said.

The system could also be used to show educational films, such as ones about disease transmission, he added.

The Sheriff's Office is also taking action to ensure that those inmates who need prescription medication are given the proper medicines, following a report that medications for two inmates were switched, Szudera said.

The sheriff said the May incident is the only instance he knows of in which prisoners were given the wrong medications. Szudera said it appears the mistake was a "human error on the part of the detention officer," but said that it's "still questionable."

"We don't know if the two inmates switched the medication themselves," he said.